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Anora, the Wounded Healer
- Teddy Hamstra, PhD
- Jun 15
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 19
When I think of the Healer archetype, I picture the cover to John Lee Hooker’s 1989 album of that name. The Healer’s cover features a shadowed photograph of this elder statesman of the blues with arms extending outward very much in the manner of a magician casting a spell. That blurry portrait is framed by a mineralized, geologic pattern reminiscent of Paleolithic cave sites from Altamira to Tierra del Fuego. Something instinctually tells me that healing is a boon of experience: to be granted the title of Healer, one must have lived thoroughly. The Healer, longed for by those in search of cures, is yet an intimidating, perhaps unrelatable, archetype, providing a vital act of care but not typically the protagonist of the myth. How then, you may rightly ask, can I suggest that the titular heroine of Sean Baker’s Anora (2024), a twenty-three-year-old sex worker played by Mikey Madison, is one of the great Healers we have seen on the silver screen in many years?
The euphoria of eros
Anora Mikheeva (she prefers “Ani”) lives in Brooklyn’s predominantly Russian-American enclave of Brighton Beach and is a stripper at a luxury Manhattan lap-dance club called Headquarters (HQ). After meeting Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), she becomes his paid escort for sexual services. The son of a prominent Russian oligarch, Vanya is a Peter Pan with G-Wagons and Maseratis he is not allowed to drive, spoiled for two decades and one year within the garden of earthly delights.
When a marathon of partying leads to an impulsive private jet flight to Las Vegas, Anora’s adolescent Prince Charming proposes. Her rejoinder, “You want to make me your little wifey?”, is met with midnight vows at the Chapel of Love. Afterwards, they stroll down Las Vegas’ Fremont Street, declaring their nuptials to strangers and kissing rapturously beneath the gigantic LED-screened canopy of this pedestrian mall. The digital firework motifs overhead evoke a hypnotic potion of mythic motifs replicating the euphoria of eros.
News of their marriage reaches Vanya’s parents, who promptly dispatch henchmen to facilitate an annulment. Vanya flees into the wintry light of day, leading to a scene of Looney Tunes hijinks (“She bites!”), but as one of them, Igor, forcibly restrains Ani, there is the discomfiting premonition of a sexual assault. Thankfully, this does not occur, but Anora’s tone markedly shifts, becoming, in my eyes, a film about the underworld journey that is archetypal to the initiation myths of Healers.
The wound of the healer
Joan Halifax (now Rishi Joan) assisted Joseph Campbell with his unfinished The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, and amongst his informal disciples has, in my mind, most vitally expanded upon his shamanic speculations. The evocative title of her 1982 survey, Shaman: The Wounded Healer, unconsciously materialized when I revisited Anora. In Halifax’s estimation, the shaman, while a “wounded healer,” is yet a healing healer. I began to see Anora anew. Her story, which I initially viewed as a Cinderella fairytale veering abruptly into nocturnal nightmare, became instead a spellbinding cinematic patterning of the shamanic initiation of a young healer.
We would do well to remember Campbell’s insistence that “one of the oldest recorded hero journey tales—possibly predating Gilgamesh—is the Sumerian myth of the sky goddess Inanna’s descent to the netherworld” (Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, 60). Mikey Madison’s Ani metamorphoses in the film’s second half into a latter day Inanna undergoing the spiritual dismemberments of a healer’s shamanic journey as the motley search party finally discovers the delinquent Vanya at HQ. At the site where once her sexuality assumed borderline supernatural powers, Ani journeys through this erotic underworld and is forced into an archetypal confrontation with the monster in the labyrinth.
In a drunken stupor, Vanya is receiving a lapdance from Ani’s nemesis Diamond, symbolic of the mythic dragon who hoards jewels and captured lovers. A fight ensues wherein Ani’s face is clawed by Diamond as Vanya is escorted outside. Her claw-marked cheek is symbolic of the dismemberment of the psyche undergone during shamanic initiation. With this “wound,” Ani is endowed with an increasing dexterity of agency in the face of Vanya’s betrayal and his parents’ attempts to dehumanize her.
Anora as Inanna
In “The Descent of Inanna,” Campbell charts how “at each of the seven thresholds that Inanna crosses into the underworld she must remove an item of clothing or jewelry so that ultimately she arrives at her sister’s kingdom naked, divested of all worldly items” (Goddesses, 61). Paradoxically, Anora, rather than stripping her clothing as we have seen her do in the film’s first half, passes through the thresholds of the search for Vanya across New York’s nocturnal underworlds essentially robed in royal garments.
With a flowing black mink coat, Madison’s character is unconsciously echoing the Tungus shamans of her distant ancestral heritage, who performed their own healing ceremonies whilst donning the hides of Siberian animals. The pink tinsel in her hair, while initially an accoutrement meant to enhance the sensorium at HQ, becomes during her journey a symbolic diadem, gleaming with the celestial light once worshipped as the domain of Inanna.
Furthermore, as part of Anora’s inversion of Inanna’s threshold clothing removals, during an exhausting walk along the waterfront on a frigid winter evening, Ani relents and eventually accepts Igor’s offer of a scarf to keep her warm; the very same scarf with which she was gagged earlier in the day. Yet in transfiguring this object of previous violence, Ani’s scarf is now a talismanic vestment of healing that aids in her heroic weathering of this long night in the underworld.
Late in the film, Igor, to her annoyance, suggests that he prefers “Anora” to “Ani” because the Russian name translates to pomegranate fruit, and/or bright light. For me, these alternating definitions are symbolic of the duality within Anora the wounded-yet-healing Healer. The Persephonesque pomegranate, a Central Asian mythological symbol of erotic bliss, is also an antioxidizing fruit of medicinal value. But like the apple tree of Inanna that aids in her rejoicing in vulvic wonderment in the ancient Sumerian myth, the pomegranate aspect of Anora’s psyche is also symbolic of the bright spiritual light within that she has steadily been kindling throughout her heroine’s journey.
Healing as alchemical
Anora’s ambiguous ending leaves the audience unsure if Ani has returned to her previous lifeways, or if her underworld journey has ended a cycle and she re-enters the home realm transfigured. Anora-Inanna the wounded healer is healing, and she offers us a cinematic archetype of the imperfections (but not impossibilities) of the mystic journey of care.
Authentic healing is a conjoining of matter and spirit, yet so often our transactional mindset deceives us into believing the curative is solely achieved on the physical plane. The shamanic initiation of Ani is instead one wherein embodiment becomes sacrament. Her inner light may be dimly perceptible to the viewer, but imperfection’s visibility ought not to obscure the radiant wounds of the healer that Anora is becoming. As the alchemists say, the Great Work continues…
The shamanic initiation of Ani is one wherein embodiment becomes sacrament.
MythBlast authored by:
Teddy Hamstra is a writer and seeker in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a PhD from the University of Southern California, where he completed and successfully defended a dissertation entitled 'Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mysticism.' Recently, Teddy has been working for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, spearheading their Research & Development efforts. As an educator and research consultant for creatives, Teddy is driven to communicate the wonder of mythological wisdom in ways that are both accessible to, and which enliven, our contemporary world.
This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Healer.
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This Week's Highlights
"The healing of the shaman is achieved through art: i.e., mythology and song. “When I began to sing,” said the shaman Semyonov Semyon, “my sickness usually disappeared.” And the practice of the shaman also is by way of art: an imitation or presentation in the field of time and space of the visionary world of his spiritual “seizure.”
-- Joseph Campbell
